Across the Divide: What Might Jewish Educators Learn from Jewish Scholars

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Across the Divide: What Might Jewish Educators Learnfrom Jewish Scholars?Barry W. Holtz

Online Publication Date: 01 May 2006To cite this Article: Holtz, Barry W. (2006) 'Across the Divide: What Might JewishEducators Learn from Jewish Scholars?', Journal of Jewish Education, 72:1, 5 - 28To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/00216240600561874URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00216240600561874

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Journal of Jewish Education, 72:5–28, 2006Copyright © Network for Research in Jewish EducationISSN: 1524-4113 print / 1554-611X onlineDOI: 10.1080/00216240600561874

UJJE1524-41131554-611XJournal of Jewish Education, Vol. 72, No. 01, February 2006: pp. 0–0Journal of Jewish Education

Across the Divide: What Might Jewish Educators Learn from Jewish Scholars?

Jewish Educators and Jewish ScholarsJournal of Jewish Education

BARRY W. HOLTZ

This article explores the possible contribution to Jewish educationfound in the resources of Judaica scholarship. It begins by explor-ing the complex and often uneasy connection between the worldof the university and the world of education and then offers analternative to this tension by suggesting ways that Jewish subjectmatter scholarship might both help expand Jewish educationalresearch and improve the actual practice of education. Four mod-els are offered as means of implementing these ideas. These modelsare explored through specific examples and analysis of the poten-tial advantages and challenges embedded in each.

The world of the university and the world of education have had an old anduneasy relationship. This is a situation true both in Jewish and general edu-cation—scholars and educators live in almost parallel universes. But,despite this divide, I would argue Jewish Scholarship offers importantresources for those in education. This article explores how these two worldsmight be bridged. In order to do so, however, I wish to contextualize theproblem by beginning with a discussion of the relationship between educa-tion and academic scholarship in general university settings. Our situationas Jewish educators is not unique; some of the reasons for the gap betweenus and the world of Judaica scholarship lie in the more general problem ofthe way that education is viewed in academic settings.

I then turn to an exploration of various ways that scholarship might beemployed both for those who are scholars of Jewish education and thosewho are working Jewish educators in the fields, and present some models

Barry W. Holtz is the Theodore and Florence Baumritter Professor of Jewish Education at theJewish Theological Seminary of America.

A shorter version of this paper was delivered at The Jewish Theological Seminary of America inNew York, February 18, 2004 upon the author’s assuming the Theodore and Florence Baumritter Chairin Jewish Education. I wish also to acknowledge the Mandel Foundation for its generous support duringthe writing stage of this project.

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6 Journal of Jewish Education

for further exploration. Finally, I look at the other side of this issue, suggest-ing some ways that Jewish education, in its turn, may have an impact onJewish scholarship.

Schools of education have had a role in universities for a long timenow, but no one would say that that role has been a comfortable one. His-torians of education have explored the reasons behind this tension; for ourpurposes, I will only mention three: social status, gender, and what mightbe called “intellectual trope.”

First, the matter of social status. The primary business of a school ofeducation is to prepare people who, for the most part, will deal with chil-dren, and very little in our culture values those who work with the young.For example, the salaries of American school teachers in general are directlyparallel to the age of the children they teach. The lowest paid teachers arethose who work in early childhood settings; the highest paid are highschool teachers. Universities, like most institutions, do not have a particu-larly high interest in children; university students who plan to go into thatfield, therefore, are not particularly valued or appreciated. As David Labaree(2004) points out, part of the “reason for the marginal status of teacher edu-cation . . . in the university” is related to the fact that education schools are

designed to prepare students for a marginal profession. Medical schoolsand law schools both provide intensely practical education to their stu-dents, but this does not harm the high standing of these schoolsbecause of the elevated status of the professions for which they are pre-paring students. . . . In part, then, the status of teacher education in theuniversity has been inseparable from the status of teaching in Americansociety. (p. 33)

A second element related to the problematic status of education in theworld of the university may now be changing, but the issue of gender cer-tainly has played a role in the university’s discomfort with education andeducators. By a very large percentage women (over 91%; in high school it ismore evenly distributed) make up the workforce of American elementaryeducation and, hence, the students in education programs in universities.Status issues related to women, scholars long have noted, also have beenpart of the story of the lower esteem in which education programs are held:

Gender has been recognized only sotto voce as a factor in the low rela-tive statue of schools of education in academe. Yet, it was a chronicthreat to their prestige in university campuses, especially at those privateand public universities which thought exceptionally well of themselves.(Clifford & Guthrie, 1988, p. 153)

Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, there is the matter of the dividebetween the work of schools of education and the dominant intellectual

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Jewish Educators and Jewish Scholars 7

trope of the university. The university values theory over practice and edu-cation is essentially a practical realm. To be sure, education is a practiceinformed by a variety of different theories and disciplines (such as psychol-ogy, sociology, literary studies, etc.; Scheffler, 1989) but its main emphasis ison the educational work performed “out in the field.” In addition the uni-versity privileges esoteric knowledge and the “lack of mystery” (Clifford &Guthrie, 1988, p. 139) perceived to be true about education is a problem forhow education is viewed in the university:

In the commodified setting of American education, usable knowledge islow-status knowledge. The more removed knowledge is from ordinaryconcerns and the more closely associated it is with high culture, themore prestige it carries with it . . . . [A]t the university teacher educationis seen as following the low road of practical instruction while the artsand sciences departments pursue the high road of more esoteric knowl-edge. (Labaree, 2004, p.33)

Everyone has been to school after all. Hence, everyone is an expert on edu-cation. (This distinguishes education from other practices taught at the uni-versity such as medicine, law, or engineering. People do not think they canperform an appendectomy even though they may have had an appendec-tomy performed on them; few people understand the esoteric language oflegal contracts and no one thinks that designing sand castles at the beachqualifies you to build a bridge across the Hudson River. Those fields havemystery! As Philip Jackson (1986) has remarked:

In America today, as is abundantly evident, nearly everyone goes toschool from age five or so onward. From the very first day of that expe-rience our store of knowledge about teachers and their work begins tobuild. By the time our schooling is complete, the tally of our face-to-faceencounters with teachers runs into the thousands. That extendedacquaintance . . . leaves many people believing that they too, thoughnot teachers themselves. . . have a pretty good idea of what the jobentails in the way of knowledge and skill. They may even go so far as toclaim that they could teach quite well themselves, if they but tried. (p. 2)

These three problem areas (and others) have led to a great deal of tensionbetween schools of education and the universities in which they sit. Histori-ans and policymakers have noted, for example, the ongoing difficulties thathave occurred when universities have tried to create partnerships withschools (Kagan, 1993; Miller & O’Shea, 1996; Rakow & Robinson, 1997).Universities simply do not feel comfortable dealing with children, and thesystems by which university scholars are trained, evaluated, and rewardedare not able to accommodate or encourage partnerships with schools.Although there are a few notable exceptions, in general these relationships

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have not been successful. Similarly, the various attempts to create practiceschools or laboratory schools within universities themselves also have beenproblematic—Dewey’s laboratory school, for example, or the Horace Mannschool which began as the experimental unit of Teachers College. There hasbeen a long history of failure in the aspirations of such arrangements, asnoble experiments eventually inched more and more toward becomingschools geared to a conventional clientele:

What these data illustrate is the pressure, in place after place, of thesocial factors moving university schools from being “practice” or “lab”schools to “model” schools to avante garde or orthodox “safe” schools—havens for the children of faculty and upper-middle-class professionalsin a changing America. (Clifford & Guthrie, 1988, p. 114)

Practice schools have not been the only area of obvious conflict. Some indi-viduals in the world of universities have called into question the very use-fulness of the field of education itself. One of the more vociferous recentcritics is Leon Botstein, president of Bard College. Bard recently introduceda new master’s degree program for high school teachers, and in an article inThe New York Times Botstein asserted, “the education schools in the UnitedStates have had an unfortunate stranglehold on teacher training . . . theyhave created a pseudoscience in pedagogy and wasted the time of futureteachers by not deepening the knowledge that future teachers need”(Arenson, 2003). In Botstein’s view teacher preparation should only beabout subject matter study; anything in pedagogy, in his eyes, simply is awaste of time.

Schools of education have responded to the problem of their status inuniversities in a variety of ways. For example, they have tried to counter theperception that education students are weaker than other students in theuniversity by recruiting “better students.” They have emphasized graduatelevel training and post-baccalaureate degrees. Most interestingly, they havetried to match the intellectual trope of the rest of university by representingthe research and study of education as more and more based in theory, oras more “scientific.” Labaree (2004) points out that such efforts are usuallyunavailing, noting that “ed schools are located at the bottom of the aca-demic hierarchy within the American University. An important source of thislow status is the nature of the knowledge produced by faculty members ineducation, especially its relentlessly soft and applied character. The pinna-cles of the academic status order are reserved for the hardest and purest ofintellectual pursuits” (p. 73). It is not accidental that the dominant mode ofuniversity research in education has come to resemble the social sciences—and for a long time it had a strong tendency toward quantitative methods ofresearch (although, like other social sciences, this has been changing in thepast decades.)

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Perhaps there are other ways of thinking about the connectionbetween scholarship and education. In fact, perhaps there are ways of see-ing the meeting place between the work of subject matter scholars and thework of education as a domain and venue for research. In the pages thatfollow I want to suggest such possibilities, thinking, of course, specificallyabout Judaica scholars and Jewish education.

I will be exploring two related concerns: the potential of Judaica schol-arship as an opportunity for educational research and the uses of Judaicascholarship for the actual practice of education. In the field of education,these two domains often are closely bound together and, I believe, this caseis no different.1

Although there are a number of different ways of thinking about therelationship between Judaica scholars and Jewish education, I am going toplace my emphasis here on one particular arena. To state the theme upfront: Scholars of subject matter can help us define the nature of the subjectmatter for the purposes of education. Note, I say can help us. I am notarguing that they currently do so, but rather such a possibility and potentialexists. I will explore the statement from a number of different angles andraise some of the challenges that such a notion entails.

What does it mean to say that scholars of Judaica can help us definethe nature of the subject matter for the purposes of education? To beginwith, let me suggest the following: Scholars of Judaica can help answer a setof questions that are crucial for any pedagogic exploration. These questionsmight include:

1. How do we think about knowledge in this discipline?2. What are the core structures of this subject matter?3. What are the ways that this subject matter is best studied?4. What is our current best knowledge about the key facts, interpretations,

concepts and ideas that we find here?5. What tools should we use in exploring this subject matter.2

6. What are the best and most interesting questions that we can ask in thisdiscipline?

These questions represent a meeting ground between education and schol-arship. Although they appear to emerge out of scholarly concerns and

1There is one issue that I will not be exploring here, namely, the limitations of using academicresearch for education. This is a subject that I have written about elsewhere at greater length. See Holtz,2002, pp. 11–24.

2Tools might include, for example, certain kinds of literary theory in approaching Jewish texts orcertain constructs from outside the world of Jewish studies to help us think about Judaica knowledge.Douglas’s anthropological reading of Leviticus in Purity and Danger (London: Routledge and KeganPaul, 1966) is a well known example; more recently Schwartz’s (2001), uses “structural functionalism”and applies this methodology to looking at ancient Jewish society.

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investigations, in fact, they are imbedded in the work of teachers as well.Every teacher is challenged to make sense of these questions for him or her-self. Teachers differ from academic scholars, however, in that they need tokeep a dual-focus—on the one hand, thinking about the subject matter andon the other being mindful of how their students will encounter the subjectmatter. One sees this, for example, in a description of the differencebetween historians and teachers of history:

. . . we are also suggesting that the goals of the history teacher differfrom those of the historian. The lodestar for historians is the discipline ofhistory. As professionals, they seek to broaden that discipline throughthe creation and discovery of new knowledge, through the formulationof novel interpretations or the refutation of old ones. Teachers of historypursue other goals. Their aim is not to create new knowledge in the dis-cipline but to create new understanding in the minds of learners. Unlikethe historian, who only has to face inward toward the discipline, theteacher of history must face inward and outward, being at once deeplyfamiliar with the content of the discipline while never forgetting thatthe goal of this understanding is to foster it in others. (Wineburg andWilson, 1991, p. 335)

To be sure, not all teachers meet that challenge well or even are aware ofthe challenge before them, but to teach a subject matter one must havereached some conclusions about how to conceptualize the materials one istrying to teach.

Certainly pedagogy encompasses more than how one understands thesubject matter. As Dewey (1990) famously observed in The Child and theCurriculum, teachers must “psychologize the subject matter” (p. 200) forthe learner; that is teachers have to figure out how learners can make senseof the disciplines that they are learning. This is a necessity Dewey (1916/1944) noted, because “The subject matter of the learner is not . . . it cannotbe, identical with the formulated, the crystallized, and systematized subjectmatter of the adult . . .” (pp. 182–183) But the act of reformulating subjectmatter for educational purposes is based on the teacher’s knowledge of thatsubject matter.

But what does it mean for teachers to “know the subject matter”? Asidefrom knowing the basic facts or concepts in a discipline Joseph Schwab andother education scholars have argued that teachers needed to have a largerperspective on the subject matter, a kind of bird’s eye view of the discipline.For Schwab (1978) these are what he called the “substantive” and “syntac-tic” structures of a discipline. (See Holtz 1999, pp. 46–47, for discussion ofsubstantive and syntactical structures.) The substantive structures of a disciplineare the large organizing interpretive frames “which are used for defining,bounding, and analyzing the subject matters they investigate,” They are thelenses through which the entire field is understood. The syntactic structures

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are the “different methods of verification and justification of conclusions”—in other words, those tools that scholars use to introduce new knowledge toa field and the canons by which evidence is viewed as acceptable or not(Schwab, 1961/1978, p. 246).

Therefore, one of the most important things that educators can learnfrom Judaica scholars is a great deal about internal structures possible in thevarious disciplines of Jewish studies. Note, I am not talking about teaching“tricks” or practices—It is not turning to scholars in order to hear “I usedthese worksheets or this vocabulary list” (as useful as this may be), rather, itis the step before that—the theory of practice, not the “practice” of teaching.

Seymour Fox (1997) has described “theory of practice” as “a formalstep, possibly a domain between theory and practice which could lead togreater coherence between theory and practice and help us in our attemptsto improve education” (p. 3). In Fox’s view, developing a theory of practiceentails two steps, first “the analysis of a theory, a philosophy, or the work ofa philosopher of education and the disclosure of their implications for edu-cational practice” (p. 4) and then “the specifications of the products of cur-riculum-making which will embody the approach to subject matter andpedagogy . . . which stem from the careful analysis of theory undertaken instep 1. . . .” (p. 5). Fox develops a continuum of five aspects of the relation-ship between theory and practice with “philosophy” at one end of abstrac-tion and “evaluation” at the other pole (see Fox & Novak, 1997, especiallypp. 28–34). Theory of practice stands midway between the two.

One way to illuminate specific theories of practice would be to take asa starting point scholars’ conceptions about the nature of their disciplines.3

Such an approach would resemble Israel Scheffler’s (1970/1989) suggestionthat exploring philosophies of particular disciplines offers a way “to linkphilosophy with educational practice in a concrete and articulate manner”and “to deepen or broaden [teachers’] grasp of their subjects” (pp. 33, 34).

In addition, in my view, this focus on theory of practice helps defineone specific research activity for scholars of Jewish education: Namely, toexplore the thinking of Judaica scholars about the nature of their disciplinesand to see, in doing so, what we can learn about the various ways that sub-ject matters can be conceptualized.

How might this be done? How might scholars of Jewish education takeadvantage of the scholarly resources of Judaica researchers? I would like tosuggest three ways to advance this agenda:

3Indeed, in the paper quoted above, Fox himself discusses as his example not a philosopher (levelone in Fox’s scheme), but an academic Bible scholar, Moshe Greenberg. More recently this approachhas been expanded to look at other academic scholars in Fox, Scheffler, Marom (2003).

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1. Hearing Scholars Speak

One of the oddities of contemporary academic culture is that we rarely getto hear scholars discourse in a global way about their work. Although aca-demic conferences give plenty of opportunity for academics to talk abouttheir research, most of those presentations focus on a fairly narrow range oftopics—sometimes highly specified or technical; more often than not, schol-ars are mainly interested in the subspecialty under investigation.

In the fall of 2000, I had the opportunity to organize a different way ofhearing scholars talk in public about the nature of their disciplines. As anexperiment the Department of Jewish Education and the Department ofTalmud and Rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary created a lunch-time seminar devoted to the question of teaching Talmud. Professor JudithHauptman of the Talmud department and I co-led the seminar.

The two departments saw this as a chance to explore the possibility ofcreating a jointly offered course, and were interested in seeing if there wassufficient demand for such an offering. In addition, I saw this as a chance tofind a way into thinking about theories of practice for the teaching of Tal-mud. In specific it seemed like an important opportunity to use the exper-tise of scholars to help explore core issues of teaching.

The seminar met every other week for an hour and 15 minutes duringlunch over the course of the semester. It was a non-credit course, but toattend students had to have attained at least third-year graduate level Tal-mud at the Jewish Theological Seminary. To our delight (and surprise)somewhere around 18 students signed up.

Six members of the Talmud and Rabbinics department volunteered topresent, a different professor speaking each week. (In fact more than sixvolunteered, but we only had sufficient time to employ six. The presenterswere: Joel Roth, Judith Hauptman, Eliezer Diamond, Margery Lehmann,Richard Kalmin, and David Kraemer.) Professor Hauptman and I briefedthem in advance. The structure of each session was simple: Faculty mem-bers began their presentations talking about their approach to teaching Tal-mud. Some focused on teaching Talmud to lay audiences in adult educationsessions; some spoke about teaching their courses at the Seminary; someaddressed teaching younger students. (In retrospect, I feel that for sake ofcomparison across the presentations, I should have asked the faculty to limitthemselves to one imagined group of learners, though there were otheradvantages to having them choose their own specific focal point in regardto students and context.)

Following the presentation the Talmudist gave a model mini-lesson forabout 20 minutes (as might be expected these lessons often ended up tak-ing more time). A question and answer section about teaching methodologyfollowed the model lesson. At the final session of the semester, I tried tosummarize what we had learned from watching these presentations and

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worked with the students on integrating what they had seen using the lensof contemporary educational research on teaching.

We learned a great deal from the Teaching Talmud seminar. The mostinteresting parts of the presentations had to do with seeing the significantdifferences among the faculty members—in terms of goals, pedagogicstyles, and implicit theories that lay behind their approaches. One could seedifferences of “orientations”—an amalgam of knowledge and beliefs thatscholars and teachers bring to any particular discipline—to use a term fromcontemporary educational research. To choose just one example: We sawthat issues of theory of practice manifest themselves in matters such as theselection of texts. One of our presenters talked about his essential commit-ment only to teach Talmudic texts (in adult education contexts) that offeredimportant and fairly immediate potential for “religious meaning.” Obviously,almost any Talmudic text can serve as a repository of religious meaning andindeed the very enterprise of Talmud study as a whole might be seen assuch. But the intention here was the choice of texts whose religious mean-ing would be more obvious and accessible for a lay audience without agreat deal of prior commitment or preparation, that is, texts about topicslike prayer, miracles, justice, the meaning of Jewish holidays or rituals etc.Another presenter said that choosing texts rich in religious meaning was nothis first priority. He chose texts based on their rhetorical and structural fea-tures; his main goal being to teach students “how to learn.” He wanted tocreate a kind of graded textbook of Talmudic texts. If the texts had religiousmeaning that was good and an added bonus, but it was not the first crite-rion of choice.

This seminar, to my mind, embodies the beginning of a research enter-prise. Often the scholars would spend time sharing aspects of practice(“This is the vocabulary list that I developed . . . .”) rather than theory ofpractice. Part of the reason for that was because their theories were often inthe realm of what Donald Schön (1982) has called the professional’s “tacitknowing-in-action” (p. 49) The emphasis here is on the word “tacit”because it takes a good deal of work and thinking to start to uncover tacitassumptions.

Moving forward with a research agenda in this arena, then, wouldentail interviewing scholars carefully about their understanding of their dis-ciplines. More than that, I would suggest, it would mean to creating interac-tive opportunities for scholars to talk to one another in a deliberativefashion about their disciplines and to interact with educators in those samesettings.

2. The Scholar’s Mind at Work

A second dimension of work with scholars might involve trying to get insidetheir thinking processes as they work. What goes on in the mind of the

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expert? Schön has written about the internal dimension of the professional’swork:

In his day-to-day practice he makes innumerable judgments of qualityfor which he cannot state adequate criteria, and he displays skills forwhich he cannot state the rules and procedures. Even when he makesconscious use of research-based theories and techniques, he is depen-dent on tacit recognitions, judgments and skillful performances.

. . . . It is this entire process of reflection-in-action which is central tothe “art” by which practitioners sometimes deal well with situationsof uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, and value conflict. (Schön,1982, p. 50)

When we ask scholars to tell us about their theories of teaching, as we didin the Teaching Talmud seminar, we are asking for considered reflection.This may suggest that there is a smooth and unidimensional movementfrom the considered theory to the action called teaching. Teaching, it mightseem, is merely the application of a well thought-through theory. Schön(1982) has characterized this as the “Technical Rationality” model of practiceand his work has been important in showing that model’s limitations (seepp. 21–69).

Although it is certainly true that a significant amount of “rationality” isinvolved in any practice—in teaching this is manifested most often as plan-ning—it also is true that the work of any practice involves a good deal ofsomething else, namely, in-the-midst-of-things action. Doctors, psychothera-pists, athletes—all must make split-second decisions. These practicesinvolves thinking, but of a particular kind. As Schön has pointed out, thelimitation of the Technical Rationality model is that it doesn’t leave room forthis other kind of mental work of the practitioner. Argyris and Schön (1974)make the case quite clearly:

When someone is asked how he would behave under certain circum-stances, the answers he usually gives is his espoused theory of action forthat situation. This is the theory of action to which he gives allegiance,and which, upon request, he communicates to others. However, the the-ory that actually governs his actions is his theory-in-use, which may ormay not be compatible with his espoused theory; furthermore the indi-vidual may or may not be aware of the incompatibility of the two theo-ries. (pp. 6–7)

When we asked our Talmud colleagues at the seminar to talk about theirwork, we heard their “espoused” theories, to use Argyris and Schön’s lan-guage, but we had no idea really if those theories were consistent with whatthey actually did when teaching a class. As Argyris and Schön (1974) go on

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to say, “We cannot learn what someone’s theory-in-use is simply by askinghim. We must construct his theory-in-use from observations of his behavior”(p. 7).

One obvious way of doing this is to watch teaching in action; if wewere to observe one of our Talmud scholars actually teaching a class andchoosing to use the kind of text that he claimed to eschew, we might seethat his espoused theory and his theory-in-use were very different. How-ever, there may be other ways to get at the same matters and to explorethem not so much at the level of enacted practice, but in the realm ofthought and theory. Would it be possible, in other words, to watch thinkingwhile it is happening?

This challenge and its importance for understanding teaching came tome in two ways. The first genesis of this idea had to do with an experiencethat I had in my nonprofessional life: I had been asked give a talk, a devarTorah, at my synagogue and I sat down at the library one day to give somethought to what I would say. Turning to the Jewish literature that came firstto mind, I began reading through the midrashic materials related to thatcoming week’s Torah portion. I was running through the texts very quicklytrying to find something that I would want either to teach or to use as astarting point for the devar Torah. I found myself rejecting certain texts on amoment’s notice and “bookmarking” certain texts that seemed to deserve acloser examination, one of which I chose to teach during the devar Torah.Later on, I started to think back about that time in the library and began toask myself a “theory of pedagogic practice” question that had never quiteoccurred to me before: How did I know that the particular text I chose toteach was a text worth teaching. In other words, what’s an “interesting text”?How does a teacher recognize an interesting text? And is what I find inter-esting different from what a scholar would find interesting—and why?

One way into answering these questions comes out of research thatSam Wineburg (2001), a professor of education at Stanford, has done incomparing the way that historians think about their discipline with theway that students think about history.4 Wineburg initiated an interestingexperiment:

I sat down with eight historians and taught them to think aloud as theyread documents about the Battle of Lexington, the opening volley ofthe Revolutionary War. (The same procedure was followed for eighthigh school students . . . .) The think-aloud technique asks people toverbalize their thoughts as they solve complex problems or readsophisticated texts. It departs from experimental research by focusing

4Wineburg draws upon work in “protocol analysis,” which attempts to look at the way peoplereport on their own thought processes see Ericsson and Simon (1993). Israel Scheffler has pointed out tome that this approach has been used in trying to study the way that artists work and that experts reason(e.g., how doctors make diagnoses.)

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on the intermediate processes of cognition, not just on its outcomes.Moreover, thinking aloud . . . asks people to report their thoughts asthey are heeded in memory, not minutes or days later; and . . . it askspeople to verbalize the contents of their thoughts, not the processesused to generate them. (p. 64)

Using a particular technique called “thinking-aloud,” Wineburg (2001) wasable to enter into the minds of his group of experts and then to comparethe historians to a group of high school students. Wineburg’s work suggestsanother route to explore with Judaica scholars—using the same approachthat he applied to the historians, ask the Judaica experts to read Talmudic orbiblical or Jewish historical sources and to compare their thinking to theway that teachers of young people (and the students themselves) addressthe same texts. Dorph (1993) explores a related model, and looks at thepedagogic thinking of two groups of students preparing to become Jewishteachers by asking them to respond to a set of focused questions and poten-tial classroom situations (“if a student said X, how would you respond . . .”).

3. Exploring What Scholars Write

Finally, we need to explore what scholars write—because a piece of schol-arly writing is probably the most direct way to explore the potential theoryof pedagogic practice about any discipline. In scholarly writing we can dis-cern the ways that scholars think about their disciplines and how that think-ing may be useful for educators.

I want to spend a little more time on this matter and give two examplesof how scholarship might be used educationally. In each example I’m goingto lay out what might be learned educationally and raise a different prob-lematic issue for the translation of scholarship to education that is embodiedin each particular case. I will consider two different examples from two dif-ferent academic domains, both very fine works of Judaica scholarship andboth with interesting pedagogic implications.

I want to begin with an example from my colleague at the Jewish Theo-logical Seminary, Professor Stephen Geller. Geller has written many marvel-ous pieces on the Bible. I will focus on an article called “The Struggle at theJabbok” that forms one of the early chapters in his book Sacred Enigmas(Geller, 1996, pp. 9–29). This is Geller’s reading of one of the great and mys-terious stories of the biblical canon, Jacob’s nighttime encounter, his wrestlingwith the angel, at the Jabbok river. I am not going to review the entire argu-ment of this highly nuanced and complex article, but I do want to point outsome reasons why I think it is particularly “pedagogic” and why, therefore, itmerits careful consideration by educators and teachers of education.

“The Struggle at the Jabbok” presents its case with a strong sense ofnarrative—it’s going someplace and the reader feels guided along a certain

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path. So, for example, the article is dotted with questions (“what is theauthor up to? Why this dance of comprehension and confusion? Why doesthe story both draw near to its context, then retreat from it” (p. 14)?) Thatsense of forward movement, of being guided, is in itself extremely peda-gogic. Scholars in recent years, for example, have written about the “narra-tive structures in curriculum” (Gudmundsdottir, 1991). And this article isclearly a “narrative.”

The article is also pedagogically rich because it is a wide-rangingapproach to the biblical text from the point of view of method. Geller usesclassic literary approaches, as well as philological and historical approaches.He also applies contemporary “reader-response” interpretations with com-ments such as: “Even as he grasps the identity of Jacob’s attacker, thereader, like Jacob, glimpses a new interpretation of the wrenched hip” (p.16). It seems to me that this multidimensional approach is particularlyappropriate for educational reflection. It challenges the teacher to think indiverse ways about the class. Since each classroom represents a multiplicityof students with many interests, strengths, and weaknesses, approachingtexts from a range of interpretive strategies opens up the possibility ofreaching more students. A similar pedagogic connection to hermeneuticscan be found in the Bible scholar Edward Greenstein’s (1999) comment that

I take the position that different theoretical approaches to literature servethe useful function of generating diverse strategies by which to read andinterpret texts. Rather than choose to delimit meaning by adhering to oneparticular school or method of criticism, readers may elect to adopt andadapt reading approaches from a variety of theories . . . . (p. 211)

Perhaps most importantly Geller’s article gives us an original reading thatwe would be unlikely to come to ourselves—indeed, “The Struggle at theJabbok” is a good choice for pedagogic purposes because it’s just plaininteresting! So, for example, exploring the particular use of certain words inthe biblical text, Geller asks why might the text have framed the language inthe way that it has? (He is talking about the part of the story in which Jacobgets the name “Israel.”) His answer:

The only reasonable answer is that it is not the author’s intention thatwe resolve this issue, that is, the ambiguity is precisely his aim. He ismaking use of the play of oppositions, as molded by the conventionaluncertainty in regard to the identity of supernatural beings, to heightenthe associative significance of the name Israel. Perhaps Jacob did defeatonly a man; the event is then itself typological and symbolic. Perhaps hedefeated God Himself, an act only comprehensible as an expression ofthe ultimate divine favor: God allowed Himself to be bested. Or perhapsit was, after all, an angel Jacob overcame, a victory tantamount to raisinghim, and his descendants, to members of the divine assembly, albeit,

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like prophets, human ones. The point is this: the meaning is in the rest-less activity of the mind as it tests each option. By being unclear on sucha vital point, the text allows intimations of all possible answers . . . .

The concept of pregnant ambiguity is a cornerstone of modern literaryanalysis. This biblical story presents an extreme example of its use. Buthere, both the ambiguity and the extremeness are, from the biblicalpoint of view, essential. The name Israel is such a mystery that paradoxis the only fit form of expression in describing its origin.(p. 23)

In trying to explain the enigma of the wrestling story, why things are sowrought and so unclear no matter which way we turn them, Geller comesto a powerful conclusion:

Gen. 32:25–33 can be understood as a paradigmatic example of thisdevice of “making strange.” The author was faced with a particularproblem. Ordinarily, nothing could be less ordinary than divine revela-tions. But in the Pentateuch they have become, in their usual form,almost routine events; Jacob has already experienced at least two ofthem (Gen. 28; 31:3, 13ff.). How, then, could he make “strange” anevent that called for a truly special effect: the naming of Israel? Theenigma of the wrestling story is the result. Older traditions have beenstructured and interwoven in the pattern of the narrative so as to triggerconflicting, intersecting reactions in the reader. (p. 28)

Now, there is a great deal to be learned from Geller’s article and, obviously,I haven’t had a chance to analyze it here except in the most cursory way.Working on the article is precisely what we would want to do with educa-tors. We would want to ask those educators to explore how might what welearn here help us teach this story and how might it guide our focus andgoals as we teach?

But thinking about the uses of scholarship for education, as I said ear-lier, also raises a set of classic challenges connected to pedagogy. Let meuse the case of Geller’s article as an opportunity to raise one of these endur-ing issues: what does it mean to turn understanding into teaching?

Just reading or even studying this piece of scholarship by Geller stillleaves us a long way away from transforming it into education or pedagogy.That transformation is a challenge that lies before us. Because what wedon’t get in a work of scholarship (of any kind) is that special kind ofknowledge that education scholars refer to as pedagogical content knowl-edge (Shulman, 1986), that is, looking at the subject matter from the pointof view of the learner. (This is what Botstein, in the remarks quoted earlier,doesn’t understand—he is thinking about subject matter knowledge, true,but he doesn’t take into account the special kind of subject matter knowl-edge that teachers need to have.)

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It is the great insight that Dewey (1916/1944) offered about the differ-ence between subject matter as viewed by the teacher and subject matter asseen by the learner. From the educator’s point of view, Dewey noted, theacademic disciplines

represent working resources, available capital. Their remoteness fromthe experience of the young is not, however, seeming; it is real. Thesubject matter of the learner is not, therefore, it cannot be, identical withthe formulated, the crystallized, and systematized subject matter of theadult . . . . Failure to bear in mind the difference in subject matter fromthe respective standpoints of teacher and student is responsible for mostof the mistakes made in the use of texts and other expressions of preex-istent knowledge. (pp. 182–183)

In other words, what teachers need to do in order to make learning comealive is to get underneath the already formulated knowledge of the scholar.Not to hear Geller’s insights as information received, but to create peda-gogic situations that allow students to uncover for themselves what he hasuncovered for us. The job of the teacher is to design those experiences, tounpack “the crystallized, and systematized subject matter of the adult.”5

Joseph Lukinsky (1987) has written eloquently about this very chal-lenge in his article “Jewish Education and Jewish Scholarship: Maybe theLies We Tell are Really True.” Lukinsky tries to use the resources of Jewishscholarship to have students replicate the process by which the scholarcame to his or her conclusions:

How then might education serve as a bridge between scholarship andmeaning?

The first level is curricular, the working-up of the scholar’s product, sothat the student may get at both its content and its “form.” By the latter Irefer to the philosophical framework embedded in it and the method-ological processes which were followed to arrive at the results. Thismeans gaining access to the scholar’s “wastebasket,” and this is difficult.Scholars present their research to other scholars, and they strive for asmooth presentation, speak in code with unspoken assumptions, andtend to bury their methodology in the footnotes. Oral presentations, too,reflect the phenomenon that Schwab has called a “rhetoric of conclu-sions” rather than a “narrative of enquiry.”

5Because my focus in this article is subject matter, I am not speaking about other matters impliedby the quotation from Dewey: namely, as much as a teacher needs to unpack subject matter, the teacheralso needs to “unpack” the students. That is, what students are interested in, how students think, whattheir abilities might be, etc.

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Unpacking works of scholarship reveals the choices the scholar hasmade, the rejected alternatives, the roads not taken, the original reasonsfor undertaking the research, the underlying presuppositions and valuesthat led to these questions and answers and not to others. Many scholarswork so intuitively, however, that much of this texture and richness, allthat makes their work educationally interesting, is thoroughly internal-ized. The impression is given that the final product had to turn out theway that it did. What the scholar sees as a superstructure to be disman-tled once the final product is completed is, for the educator trying tobuild curriculum, everything.

Education means uncovering the apparatus and enabling the student toparticipate in the scholar’s inquiry.(p. 209)

Similar to the way that a science teacher might guide students throughexperiments that “real” scientists have performed—and the thinking that ledto the design of those experiments—Lukinsky argues for a kind of engage-ment by the student in the “backstage” story of the Judaica scholar’s work.

Thinking about the process of educational planning in this way is simi-lar to the conclusions reached by Deborah Ball, an education scholar at theUniversity of Michigan, who is concerned about how the teacher needs tothink about designing educational experiences for learners. The relationshipbetween a teacher’s knowledge of subject matter and a teacher’s practice ofteaching is complex. Ball (2000) shows that the teacher needs to make themoves that take one from knowledge of the subject to structuring learningexperiences for others.

Among other things, it requires “the capacity to deconstruct one’s ownknowledge into a less polished and final form, where critical componentsare accessible and visible” (Ball, 2000, p. 245). A polished knowledge ofsubject matter may actually inhibit thinking about how others may learnwhat you already know. Even the outwardly simple task of offering anexplanation only will work with learners “if it is at a sufficient level of gran-ularity, that is, if it includes in it the steps necessary for the reasoning tomake sense for a particular learner or a whole class, based on what theycurrently know or do not know” (p. 245).

Therefore, “polished” articles such as Geller’s need to be viewed aseducational resources—as Dewey said (1944), they are “working resources”but they are not yet pedagogy. They are waiting for a certain kind of curric-ularizing effort by teachers. Geller and others may offer ideas about what toteach and why to teach it, but that is only the first part of “pedagogicalthinking,” “thinking about how to build bridges between one’s own under-standing and that of one’s students” (Feiman-Nemser & Buchman, 1986, p.239). In what way can the teacher take apart the finished product andrestore that “granularity”? The task of the teacher is to do that unpacking,but the scholar’s contribution is one way that that process might begin. One

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might add that those who teach teachers—teacher educators—would bewise to consider ways to take advantage of resources such as Geller’s arti-cle, but they would need to think about how to help teachers make senseof the pedagogic possibilities inherent in such work.

My second example offers a different kind of contribution and also adifferent kind of difficulty. The article is a classic piece by GershomScholem, “The Neutralization of Messianism in Early Hasidism.” In this arti-cle, Scholem (1971) wants to explore why Hasidism, in contrast to Jewishideologies in the centuries prior to its emergence, seems to have so muchless emphasis on the coming of the Messiah:

We are induced to ask why [in Hasidism] there should be this radicalemphasis on the essentially non-Messianic nature of human activity . . . .The answer seems clear to me. It is in deliberate reaction to the danger-ous line of Messianism practiced by man, a line leading up to the Sabba-tian upheaval, that these ideas were conceived. The Lurianic teaching onthe holy sparks was not just thrown out—its appeal was much toostrong for that—but it was reinterpreted in a manner that took the dan-gerous sting of Messianism out of it. Let us accomplish our task of per-sonal salvation, it seems to say, and forget about the Messiah. Maybethat will pave the way for him. The immediate goal of Hasidism in thosegenerations was no longer the redemption of the nation from exile andthe redemption of all being. That would be Messianism, even after theSabbatian conflagration. The goal, as formulated in the works of theRabbi of Polnoye, is the mystical redemption of the individual here andnow, i.e., redemption not from exile, but in exile, or in other words, thedestruction of exile by its spiritualization. Sabbatianism, the revolutionagainst exile, had failed. Hasidism, with the destructive consequences ofthis tragic failure before its eyes, renounced the idea of Messianic revoltand made its peace with exile, a precarious and uneasy peace, it is true,but peace all the same. It did not deny the original doctrine of redemp-tion by the raising of the sparks, but it removed from it the acute Messi-anic tension. (p. 195)

That is, in Scholem’s view, Hasidism represents a response to the dangerousepisode of messianism found in Sabbateanism and the Frankists. Those messi-anic movements flowed directly out of the messianism of Lurianic Kabbalah.As Scholem presents it, the Jewish community was so unnerved by the messi-anic disasters of the previous 100-plus years that Lurianic Kabbalah was rein-vented in a new and personalized way by early Hasidism. It is a move awayfrom Messianism toward an emphasis on individual spirituality.

Like Geller’s article Scholem’s “Neutralization” is also deeply peda-gogic. It organizes complex ideas exceptionally well; it gives a clearnarrative; in essence it tells a story. Indeed because it is a piece of historicalwriting, it’s even closer to narrative—as one might expect—than Geller’sinterpretive reading of a text. This is a great and highly pedagogic

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argument. Those who wish to teach this episode in Jewish intellectual his-tory have a useful resource in Scholem’s paper.

But it too raises challenging issues: First, is the argument perhaps toonice and neat? Does the world of historical explanation fit so well into thiskind of narrative? The direct line from Lurianic Kabbalah to Shabbatei Zvi toHasidic neutralization—aren’t there many small details that don’t fit the the-sis being left out here? Is it really such a nice flow? But as a teacher (not ahistorian) I’m less troubled by this question. As a teacher I am alwaysinvolved in some level of smoothing out the details, or “popularizing” fornonspecialists.

But the main challenge in the Scholem case is not the nature or validityof his scholarly argument. It is instead the matter of what it means for ateacher to “keep up” with current knowledge. Because the view presentedby Scholem has, like many other aspects of scholarly life, been subjected tocritique and revision. In this case, most famously, by Moshe Idel’s (1995)large project (over many books) reimagining the history and substance ofJewish mysticism. Idel attacks Scholem’s position quite directly:

Thus, according to both Buber and Scholem, Lurianism had to lose itsputative vital messianic character in order to function effectively in thenew “critical” conditions of mid-eighteenth century Poland. Scholemsuggested, therefore, that Devequt, essentially confined to the inner pro-cess of individual redemption, had come to replace the collective messi-anism of the “Lurianic” school. In principle, I am inclined to acceptScholem’s phenomenological diagnosis of what was most highly valuedin Hasidism, although I strongly disagree with his historical explanationfor it . . . .

Thus it would be better, even from Scholem’s point of view, to conceiveof the neutralization of messianism in general-rather than of Lurianicmessianism alone-not as a special case of the struggle with the quandaryof Sabbateanism, but as part of a larger scheme or religious paradigm forconstructing a devotional, ahistorical mysticism, free from any concretegeographical ties. While some aspects of this scheme had also servedpolemical purposes, as did the attempt to counteract Sabbatean andFrankist heretical messianism, their significance should not be reducedmerely to their having solved these quandaries. (p. 16)

The job of a teacher differs from that of a scholar, as I mentioned above.Teachers need to be knowledgeable about their subject matters, true, buthow does the teacher remain “deeply familiar” (Wineburg & Wilson, 1991,p. 335) with the material? Keeping up is hard work and it’s really notobvious in the job description of teachers. Teachers are asked to preparelessons, teach many hours a week, read and grade student papers, to nameonly a few daily tasks. The press of these obligations makes it difficult to

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stay abreast of scholarly debates; one tends to stick with the familiar—theexplanations and interpretations that have been always been part of one’srepertoire. Perhaps one role for scholars in the interaction with educators issimply to help teachers stay up to date! How such opportunities might befruitfully created is an important topic that needs exploration. One role forscholars that I developed at greater length in my Textual Knowledge, (Holtz,2003, pp. 166–69) is in helping teachers design appropriate “representa-tions” (exercises, examples, analogies, metaphors, etc.) that remain faithfulto the subject matter and also help understanding grow in the minds ofstudents.

The two examples I have used here from Geller and Scholem raiseonly some of the issues that would emerge out of using written scholarshipfor the purposes of Jewish education—but they can indicate directions thatcould easily be pursued.

All three dimensions of the interaction between scholars and educatorsthat I have explored in the pages above—that is, “Hearing Scholars Speak,”“The Scholar’s Mind at Work” (thinking outloud), and “Exploring WhatScholars Write”—are aimed at answering my original question, “what canscholars of Judaica and scholars (and practitioners) of education say to oneanother?” We have here at least part of an agenda, relating to my earlierstatement scholars of subject matter can help us define the nature of the sub-ject matter for the purposes of education. How?

1. through studying what scholars actually say about their work;2. by setting opportunities for scholars to talk about their work and meet

with educators about their work;3. by investigating how scholars think about their work;4. by analyzing scholarly writing for the theory of practice embedded within it.

There is still a great deal more to be said about the relationship betweenscholarship and education and I want to raise something not yet covered inthe comments above. This is an overriding issue that applies to any attemptto curricularize the contributions of scholars: Namely, not how to turnscholarly ideas into pedagogy—as we discussed in looking at Geller’sarticle—and not the problem of “keeping up” that we saw in the Scholemand Idel case, but the whole issue of why we teach any of this at all. What Ihave called in another context “what’s worth learning here” (Holtz, 2003,pp. 159–163). If what matters to the teacher (as opposed to the scholar6) isthe subject matter from the learner’s point of view, we need to think about

6Note that we are talking about “pure” categories here—in most cases historians are also teachersof history at universities or colleges. But when they are sitting in the library wearing their scholar hats(and not thinking about the courses they offer across the campus) their goals and tasks and focus differgreatly from teachers, some of whom may also be scholars, in their spare time so to speak.

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what it is that we are teaching and why. So, as much as scholars may helpus understand their subject matters, we still need to place those insights intothe larger picture of educational purposes.

One important effect of exposing teachers to scholars and their writing isbroadening teachers’ perspective beyond the realm of the practical, movingteachers into these very questions of goals and purposes. Since teachers liveunder the very real constraints of dealing with the give and take of interac-tion with students and with the time pressures that cut into their opportuni-ties for preparation and planning, spending time looking at works ofscholarship may seem like a luxury that is not essential. But it is preciselythese kinds of intellectual encounters that make teaching live at a muchmore profound and important level. As Scheffler (1989) argues:

If we accordingly conceive of the education of teachers not simply asthe training of individual classroom performers but as the developmentof a class of intellectuals vital to a free society, we can see more clearlythe role of educational scholarship and theoretical analysis in the pro-cess. For, though the latter do not directly enhance craftsmanship, theyraise continually the sorts of questions that concern the larger goals, set-ting and meaning of educational practice. It is these questions that stu-dents need continually to have before them as they develop into matureteachers, if they are indeed to help shape the purposes and conditionsof education. To link the preparation of teachers with such questions isthe special opportunity of the university. (pp. 92–93)

Scholars provide one kind of answer to the question of goals in their aca-demic work: Scholars write in the ways that they do because their writingreflects the nature of the discipline itself. Or at least the way that the disci-pline is understood in the academy. As long as the community of scholarsrepresented by the university embraces a particular discipline and a set ofways appropriate to learning it, it is worth learning and learning in thosespecific ways. And, of course, there are specific disciplines or ways ofstudying disciplines that the community of scholars comes to reject, as onecan see in both the sciences and humanities.

From that point of view it may be said that schools are following thepathways paved by advanced scholars. Mathematics, history, Bible are alltaught with at least one eye focused on the scholarly canons of the specificdisciplines. This was what Joseph Schwab (1978) meant by saying that theschool curriculum should be “a representation of the discipline” (p. 269).

But this idea may be insufficient. It leaves out the fact that some of thework done in universities is truly only the province of specialists and is notmeant for a general audience—of children or of adults. But more than thatthe educational justification based on the fact that this is what is done inacademia, fails to respond to larger questions about the nature of what weare doing in schools. To return to Fox’s (1997) continuum discussed earlier,

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what we are missing is a rationale for education at the level of philosophy. Itis philosophy of education that allows us to answer questions of practice,allows us to say, in essence, why this and not that whenever we are facedwith an educational situation or opportunity. In the words of MichaelRosenak (1995):

Philosophy of education is predicated on the axiom that only wherethere are ideals of human behavior, aspiration, morality, and under-standing is it possible to establish what the content of education shouldbe. The philosopher of education is one who insists that educationaldecisions ought to be made and defended in terms of what we believeabout reality, knowledge, and value. For only when we consider whatwe believe and how we should therefore act, can we answer . . . : whyare these dispositions (rather than others) to be regarded as excellencesand cultivated? Only after dealing with that question is it appropriate toask: how shall we go about educating toward these excellences? Towhat extent can they be transmitted? For whom? And by which means?(pp. 5–6)

One attempt to address these larger questions of purposes can be found ina recent book, Visions of Jewish Education (Fox et al. 2003), which developsa model about the possible contribution of Judaica scholars to Jewish edu-cation that is somewhat different from the ideas expressed earlier in thisarticle. Here a number of academic scholars of Judaica (along with scholarsof education and Jewish education) serve as repositories of a range ofvisions about the ultimate outcomes and purposes of Jewish life. Each ofthese visions flows naturally into a conception of a philosophy of educationand, in some cases, even into various theories of practice for specific subjectmatters.

Visions lays out explicit, educationally oriented visions, but Judaicascholars also have contributed more indirect representations of vision.These are to be found, as I’ve argued above, in their scholarly work, but inaddition to that, it may be possible to see such implicit visions in whatmight be called “scholarship in the middle range.” This is a more recentphenomenon of scholars writing about their disciplines not for other schol-ars in academic publications, but for a more popular audience, books thattry to open up Jewish study and show why it is so compelling.

This approach may have begun with two works from some fortyyears ago: Nahum Sarna’s (1966) Understanding Genesis and LeoSchwartz’s (1956) Great Ages and Ideas of the Jewish People. Both ofthese books were attempts to popularize Jewish scholarship for a gen-eral audience, but more than that both of them were rich resources forJewish education, a fact that was built into the conception of Sarna’swork from the beginning. These books were only the beginning of an ever-growing market of books written by scholars for a general audience.

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Perhaps even more than the scholarly works that I cited earlier in thisarticle, such books offer a resource for a meeting place between scholarsand teachers.7

I have tried to look at the relationship between Jewish scholarship andJewish education and I have spent most of the argument investigating theimpact that scholars can have on educators. But this should not be viewedas a one-way street. One can ask as well: What can Judaica scholars learnfrom educators? In my view, the answer is “quite a bit.” When scholars areasked to think seriously about questions of education, they are forced tolook at their underlying assumptions, both about what they are doing andwhy they are doing it, in ways that their general scholarly discourse may notallow.

More than that, scholars are forced to present their ideas with a kind ofclarity and transparency that is not always necessary when addressing col-leagues. Educators and their students will ask the most basic of questionsand there is nothing that calls for a more sophisticated answer than a reallybasic question. The Judaica scholars who worked on Visions of Jewish Edu-cation, for example, were required to meet with groups of working educa-tors. The questions that those educators asked forced the scholars to refinetheir thinking and work harder on their ideas.

Beyond all that an engagement with educators may encourage scholarsto think much more deeply about the entire enterprise of scholarship itself.Because in an ultimate sense education deals with the real world, we arealways forced to look at what we are doing. These encounters force schol-ars to answer the questions that are at the core of their entire enterprise:What makes this interesting? Why is this worth learning? Why does it matter?

REFERENCES

Alter, R. (2004). The five books of Moses: A translation with commentary. New York:W.W Norton.

Arenson, K. W. (2003, December 14). At Bard College, a plan to teach teachersmore of what they’re teaching. The New York Times.

Argyris, C., & Schön, D. (1974). Theory in practice: Increasing professional effective-ness. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

7Schwartz’s book was a particular inspiration for me when I edited Back to the Sources: Reading theClassic Jewish Texts (1984). Also, a number of teacher’s guides and curriculum materials published by theMelton Center emanated out of Sarna’s work, e.g., Zielenziger (1979) plus subsequent editions. GailDorph has suggested another rich resource that needs to be explored for Bible teachers are the newBible commentaries—particularly on the Pentateuch—for the general reader that have appeared inrecent years; e.g., Alter (2004), Fox, (2000). Lieber, et al. (2001), Plaut (1981), Scherman (1993), whichdoes not present itself as an academically oriented publication, but continues to have a great deal ofinfluence on educators.

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Ball, D. L. (2000). Bridding practices: Intertwining content and pedagogy in teach-ing and learning to teach. Journal of Teacher Education, 51 (3), 241–247.

Clifford, G. J., & Guthrie, J. W. (1988). Ed schools: A brief for professional education.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dewey, J. (1944). Democracy and education. New York: Macmillan. (Original workpublished 1916).

Dewey, J. (1990). The school and society and the child and the curriculum. Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press.

Dorph, G. Z. (1993). Conceptions and preconceptions: A study of prospective Jewisheducators’ knowledge and beliefs about Torah. Unpublished doctoral disserta-tion, Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York.

Douglas, M. (1966). Purity and danger. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Ericsson, K. A., & Simon, H. A. (1993). Protocol analysis: Verbal reports as data.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Feiman-Nemser, S., & Buchman, M. (1986). “The first year of teacher preparation: Tran-

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Across the Divide: What Might Jewish Educators Learn from Jewish Scholars

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